


Mistress of Sabres

by CytosineSkald



Series: Missing Scenes [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: New Jedi Order Series - Various Authors
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, children aren't meant to be soldiers even if they're jedi, gratuitous flirting, jaina definitely has post traumatic stress, sabacc rules break my brain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 05:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18004382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CytosineSkald/pseuds/CytosineSkald
Summary: Some beer, some conversation, a card game, and an ending that is neither sure nor solid. But what had ever been sure or solid for them? Nothing in a long time, perhaps, not in a real way. So maybe it's only right like that. Something unsteady, as they're both already unsteady.“So what’re we ‘all-in’ on, hm?” He settled his elbows more comfortably on his knees. “What’s going on the table?”“What do you have that you’re willing to part with, old man?”“What do I have that you want, Solo?”She watched his eyes flicker down to her mouth and back, and she raised her eyebrows, tapping her forefingers on his calves like a snare drum. “Kyp Durron, are you flirting with me?”“Not if you don’t want me to be.”





	Mistress of Sabres

**Author's Note:**

> Everything with Kyp Durron... I always assume that something went down between NJO and LOTF with Kyp, and maybe this was a way to reconcile that. Now, let's not get me wrong. I love Jag a lot, and for me, he and Jaina are kind of endgame, but I ALSO love Kyp, and thusssss...
> 
> Also Sabacc's rules break my brain a little because I'm terrible at cards, so sue me.
> 
>  
> 
> EDIT: People seem to like how I write banter. Y'all should just be glad that none of the banter that I write ever is actually reflective of the banter that happens at my dinners with the squadron lads. There would be a lot less of this and a lot more garbage about going fishing with one long chest hair and hanging security passes off of third nipples grown from the chemicals resultant from eating too many IMPs and flight lunches stolen from SAR techs. 
> 
> Which is, you know, far less romantic.

“Okay, okay, I’m not drinking anymore,” Kyp set his glass down and waved his hand above it, shaking his head. There was no light left to angle through the window, the view having changed from the orange sunset to the Coruscanti landscape of lights. Terraformed moss still crawled up the sides of buildings in daylight, and strange animals called in the night from eyries high up in the ruined bones of apartment towers that hadn’t been remade yet -- but at night, they could almost forget that the war had only been over for three years, and that the planet barely resembled what they had left. The devastation was still so obvious in the daylight. Nighttime hid a great deal of sins, and a great deal of loss.

“You’ve had  _ one _ beer, Kyp,” Jaina handed him another cold bottle and flopped down on his sofa next to him, settling into the cushions and pulling her feet up. “Since when are you such a lightweight?”

“I’m a delicate flower, Jaina, I thought you knew.” He took the bottle anyway, and popped the cap with a brush of the Force against the seal. “And I’m too old for this.”

“You’re thirty-nine, you’re not old.”

“Says the twenty-four year old.”

“Right. Because being thirty-whatever means anything.” She rested her elbow along the back edge of the sofa and looked towards the window, where Coruscant’s lights sparkled above the dark spaces where greenery still clung. Coruscant had always been a landbound sky -- sparkling in the darkness. The terraforming was like someone held their hand over where the stars should be. “Think it’ll ever go back to the way it was?”

“No.”

“Guess not,” she took a sip. It was middling beer from Commenor, bought because it was inexpensive, not good, and she winced as it went down. He knew better than anyone how homes died. Deyer had been his home once, a water world with his family, destroyed by the Empire -- and then Kessel, as a slave, eagerly abandoned. Then Yavin, destroyed by the Vong. Yavin had been her home, too, in its way, and there was nothing left there for either of them. Coruscant, at least, was rebuilding. “Just hard to believe sometimes that it’s all gone. So much of what I grew up with is under…” she threw a palm at the dark spaces on the Coruscanti landscape, “ _ That _ .”

“Yeah, well,” Kyp lifted a shoulder and made a face at the bottle in his hand after drinking, “Them’s the breaks, I’m afraid.”

“I know,” she tilted a thin smile at him and imitated his shrug back. She couldn’t change the unchangeable. No one could. “But how goes the Council? Big Fancy Jedi High Councillor Durron here.”

“You have to ask?”

“Sure,” she rested her cheek on her own shoulder, “I just go where you tell me. I’m not a policy-maker. So how goes it?”

Kyp held the beer bottle up between them and squinted at her over the mouth, “Jedi Solo, are you pumping me for info? Here I thought you just wanted to spend some time with me.”

She smiled and tapped her own beer bottle against her lips, “I promise I’m not. I’m just asking.”

He squinted at her playfully for another moment before pursing his lips and kicking his feet up onto the caf table. “Well, I gotta put up with Horn, and enduring your aunt and uncle giving me the hairy eyeball about everything, but otherwise fine -- so much admin work, Jaina. I have to talk to so many politicians.” He sagged back into the cushions, looking tired. “It’s a crisis every five minutes. Absolute agony.”

“I’m sorry about your life.”

“I almost miss shooting up the Vong.”

She laughed and shook his shoulder, affectionate and brief, “Aww, you’ll always have me, old man.”

“Comforting.”

Jaina snapped her fingers and shifted cross-legged on the cushions, turning to face him, “There. There’s something we can do.”

“What’s that?”

She set her bottle of beer in the hollow of her legs and rubbed her palms together. “Well, what did we do during downtime on Twin Suns?”

Kyp frowned, and Jaina raised her eyebrows at him, leaning in slightly like an invitation to answer.

“Drink.”

She scoffed, “No!  _ Other _ than that.”

“Filled out requisitions forms so you could get a new astromech every other day.”

“No! And I wasn’t that bad. I only lost… two.”

“Two more than me,” he snickered, but leaned back, “Sabacc. We played sabacc. What, you want to do that?”

She grinned, tapping fingertips against the cold neck of her bottle, “Sure. For old times, and we’ve already run through my day, your day, my parents’ well-being and all of the usual smalltalky subjects.”

Kyp laughed, “I have almost no desire to mentally relive when the three of us tried playing strip sabacc, so no thank you. That was more of Jag than I ever needed to see.”

Jaina felt her smile go brittle, and a curl of petty frustration and shame lifted its head out of the trash compactor she had shoved it into. She had stuffed that down the garbage chute and turned on the machine, and it still insisted on trying to crawl out, some days. “Yes, well,” she said, licking her teeth and leaning away from him, staring down into the narrow mouth of the beer bottle even as she kept her smile going. She could hear the sudden edge in her own voice. “You won’t have to worry about seeing  _ that _ ever again, so that’s no danger.”

She felt Kyp’s regret telegraphing strongly the moment after she opened her mouth. Instant.

“Jaina, you’re not still upset about this Jag thing, are you? It’s been months.”

She picked up her beer and pursed her lips, shaking her head, waggling her beer nonchalantly and putting more force behind the smile. “Upset? Who’s upset? I told him to leave, he got angry, we yelled and he left. It’s done. Distracting me won’t work -- just get your cards, Durron, unless you think you’re gonna lose.”

Kyp eyeballed her but eventually pushed himself to his knees with a groan and went rummaging through a drawer, looking for where she knew he had sabacc cards stashed away. It was easy, with Kyp. It was always easy. He was a manipulative pain in the ass, but it was easy. She drank more from her bottle as she watched him hunt. Jag had accused her of distance, of being withdrawn. Jag could go to hell, just like he’d told her to do. That had been ugly, but it was over. Very over. Kyp glanced back over his shoulder at her while he leaned into the kitchen for some food and she raised her eyebrows back, humming inquisitively.

“I didn’t ask after Jacen. Any word?”

Jaina stretched out her legs, hooking her heels on the edge of the caf table and slouching down until she could rest her head back against the cushions, beer bottle on her stomach. She knew she looked like a lush. That was fine. She felt like one.

“No. I can tell you that he’s alive, and he’s content, and I can tell you he’s…” she closed her eyes and concentrated, throwing her arm out towards galactic southeast, “That way. But other than that, not a clue what he’s up to. Wish he’d just… call. Or something. Jerk.”

“He’s probably busy doing nerdy hermit things. Who knows with that one.” Kyp ambled back with a sabacc deck in hand, falling heavily back onto the sofa and taking a long draw from the neck of his bottle, setting a bowl of nuts between them. “Never had as good a peg on him as I did on you.” He winked as he tossed some nuts back and dealt out cards between them.

“You think you’ve got me pegged?” she eyed him, pressing the mouth of her beer to her lips again.

He glanced back up at her as he dealt out the cards, “You’re easy, Sticks. Had you the minute we talked on Dubrillion. So desperate to prove yourself. Lording your success over me.”

“I was sixteen.”

“You were easy.”

She smiled against the glass, tapping it against her chin as he finished dealing the cards and turned to face her, drawing his own legs up to cross them. “Don’t think you ever beat my record on Lando’s Folly,” she said, rolling back time to that period just hours before the Yuuzhan Vong struck.

He set the draw deck down and tilted his head at her. “I think I caught you anyway.”

“Careful, Durron,” she grinned at him, picking up her cards and fanning herself with them, “Gettin’ a little personal there.”

“Maybe.” He grinned back, watching her just a moment longer than was maybe comfortable, cards hanging from his fingers. “You want to start, or shall I?”

“Age before beauty.”

He snorted, but considered his hand. “I’m going to regret this. You’re going to take me for everything. Just like every other time we’ve played.”

“Oh, we’re putting money on this?”

“Figure of speech.” Kyp looked up at her over his cards, “I’m a Jedi Master, I’m supposed to entertain a modicum of asceticism. I got nothin’ on me, Solo.”

She laughed through her nose and looked at her cards. She had a middling hand -- it could really skew either way. She would have to change her approach depending on how he played. It would have to be a careful dance, a slow feeling-out of each other, trying to weasel the truth from the lies. Like always. “Too bad. Would’ve enjoyed stripping you of your earnings.”

“Such an attitude.” He eyeballed her cards and squinted at them, and then at her, as if trying to pluck the numbers from the surface of her brain like he could from a layperson. “She forgets I’m technically her superior.”

“I was under the impression that we took off our ranks when the beer came out.”

“Oh, so was I,” he hummed, licking his lips and pondering over a card. “Which is why I’m going to ask you this as a friend, not as one of your bosses.” He set a card down and drew again, flicked the randomizer on a card in his hand and considered the house card that sat face-up on the table. “Everything okay with you? You seem… I don’t know. Distant.”

Jaina was sure she felt the room’s temperature drop a degree or two, and she had to pat down resentment at the question very, very quickly. It reared its head so fast. Instead, she considered her hand against the house cards and did her best to look nonchalant. Jag echoed somewhere behind her ears --  _ So you’ve, what, been leading me on? If you weren’t interested, why didn’t you tell me? You’ve always been bad at confrontation, but I never pegged you as cruel _ . She had a -20 to the house’s 4, and that just wasn’t good enough. “Oh?”

“You’re a little, ah, how to say. It’s like you’ve been holding people at arm’s length. Everyone’s noticed. We’ve all known you since you were yea high to a Chadra-Fan.”

She scowled down at her cards and flicked the randomizer. A -5 flickered into The Idiot card, and something about that seemed appropriate, and only made her hand worse. “I’m here spending time with you, aren’t I? How is that holding people at arm’s length?”

“I mean in general.” He watched her hands as she fanned and unfanned her cards.

“I’m fine,” Jaina dropped two cards and redrew, the Idiot still hovering around in her hand. “Maybe I’ve just decided it’s not worth the effort. It’s not a layered answer.”

“I’m worth the effort, am I? I’m touched. -- gonna call this hand.”

“Yeah, you are, but you get it, so you’re easy.” She set her cards down and knew she had a losing hand unless she convinced him otherwise.

“Get what?”

She shrugged, leaning back and draining the last from her beer, staring down into it before leaning across to set it on the caf table. “Just --  _ it _ . You know.”

Kyp gave her a meaningful look before nodding shallowly. He knew. He’d seen the very worst of her. He knew what hardship was, what it meant, and even if he couldn’t know what it was like to  _ feel _ a teammate die firsthand, he knew what it was like through her. They’d lashed their thoughts together when they shared Twin Suns squadron -- two Jedi flying as one person, with one mind and Jagged Fel on their wing. He knew through her how voxyn acid felt, the agony of seventeen Jedi leaving and eleven coming back, and she knew what the endless darkness of glitterstim mines felt like -- distant, as if dreamed, but real. And he knew what she had done, what she had roped him into doing. Vivisection and death for some greater purpose she had been arrogant enough to believe was her province. He knew.

“I’m not going to explain myself to people who don’t… know,” she said, setting her cards down. No amount of lollygagging was going to make it a better hand. “That’s all. Now, you ready to lose? Because you’re gonna.”

“I don’t feel pressured with nothing on the table, so I think I’m just gonna keep on keepin’ on. Unless you feel like upping the ante.”

“No ante to be upped,” she leaned toward him conspiratorially, drawing her legs up again, elbows braced on her winged-out knees, “No trash talking, here. I’m always all in.”

“‘Zat so, Solo?” He leaned forward the same way, challenging. Up close, he really was coloured the same way Jag was -- black hair, green eyes. But where Jag had been bright, piercing and hawklike, almost inhuman, the green on Kyp was dark, nearly black; dark enough to be dangerous, like the rest of him. Like even the cool light of him in the Force was backlit with flash-frozen fury. It was supercooled anger, like he had dipped himself into liquid pain, sublimating at room temperature. She wondered if Kyp saw her the same way -- he had said once that they weren’t so different after all. Maybe she was the same strange, frosted-over wrath in the Force that he was, like Naboo pottery where cracks were filled in with something else. Sometimes she wondered, too, if the only reason she hadn’t done as much damage as he had was because she hadn’t had a Sun Crusher when she was thrashing about in the dark. Maybe the only difference between them had been the weapons at their disposal. She wasn’t sure she wanted to entertain thoughts of how she would have rationalized its use. She was sure she would have. She had ordered a man cut open still living -- for science. For weapons to use against the Vong. Because he was nothing. He was a nothing. He had been a tool, not a person. She had to live with that act. Jag was too good. He couldn’t have understood. Kyp did.

She didn’t back away from his challenge, mood a little poisoned, but still confident.

“All-in. Always.”

“So what’re we ‘all-in’ on, hm?” He settled his elbows more comfortably on his knees. “What’s going on the table?”

“What do you have that you’re willing to part with, old man?”

“What do I have that you want, Solo?”

She watched his eyes flicker down to her mouth and back, and she raised her eyebrows, tapping her forefingers on his calves like a snare drum. “Kyp Durron, are you flirting with me?”

“Not if you don’t want me to be.”

She hummed, licking her lips and glancing down at the cards they had both laid out. “Well,” she said, word measured with thought, “I think I’m just stupid enough to bet favours.”

“Not sure I’d ever call you stupid,” Kyp patted hands on her knees like she had tapped fingers on his legs, “Unwise, maybe, which is why you’re still trying to win this hand when you so  _ clearly _ have nothing. But not stupid.”

That did put a smile on her face. Not something that was forced, or poisoned by the bad mood from earlier about the war, and Myrkr, and Jag (he had bled heartbreak and hurt pride and anger when she last saw him). It was nice, hearing the affirmation, even if it wasn’t true. Kyp loved to bluff. He loved to lie about his cards, loved to make you think he was doing something other than what he was doing. He was bluffing -- both her and the game. Jaina pulled one hand back to herself and hooked a nail under the edge of one of Kyp’s cards. Lifting it just a fraction, she glanced back up at him.

“Favours then?”

“Favours.”

“And nothing embarrassing, inappropriate or weird.”

“She sounds defensive, could she be  _ doubtful _ about her hand?”

With a flick of her finger Jaina flipped over one card -- a 16. She grinned. The house was a 4. He would have to have gotten something under 3 to win the hand. Then she flipped the second, and the smile melted away. A 2. 22. Just short of pure sabacc. He reached over and flipped over her cards. -10 and -11. The Idiot had flickered into a different card while she had bargained terms with Kyp. 

“I think this means I’m owed a favour.”

She frowned downward, staring at the cards as if at some point they would say something different. It was a loss. It did happen, but she never  _ liked _ it. Especially on the first hand. She and her father debated what the worst hand to lose on was, and he was right — losing on the last hand was worst, but other than when there was a great deal of money on the table on the last hand, the worst hand to lose on, Jaina thought, was the first. It made her feel like a rank amateur.

“Fine,” she scowled, leaning back and away from him where he had been almost dangerously close to her. Close enough to get into something, close enough that if one of them had moved just a few inches forward— She leaned back on her hands. “What do you want?”

Kyp leaned back, himself, and made a show of thinking, tilting his head from shoulder to shoulder and looking at her down the length of his nose. Eventually he waggled the empty beer bottle in his hand at her. “Could do with two more of these, and I’m in no mood to move.”

Jaina blinked at him, corner of her mouth twisting upward. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Really.”

“Until I win next hand, of course.”

She leaned forward again to pluck the empty bottle from his fingers, pushing herself to her feet. “Of course.”

She tossed the bottles down a recycling chute and retrieved two more cold ones, popping open the caps with the Force like Kyp had done earlier. Was it a demeaning use of it? Sure. But if the Jedi Master in the room had done it first, what could be the harm? It was a little sin. The caps could go down the recycler, too, and she listened to them clatter down the chute, tinny and hard. Down and down and down and down. She and Jacen had been brought up from the undercity in a pipe like that when they were two, maybe three. That would have been when Kyp was in the throes of his madness, seething with crackling, lightning-hot rage. Sun exploding anger. It was probably better she had never seen, that she’d been too young. Put a certain way it was easy to understand why Stick-to-the-Regs Corran Horn couldn’t bring himself to trust him. Not after that.

Jaina slumped back over, settling herself into the sofa and handing him a new bottle. 

“Thought you didn’t want anything else to drink.”

“That was before we were playing cards. Sabacc isn’t right without some light drinking.”

She settled herself back as Kyp cleared away her losing hand and dealt them both two new cards. She stared down at hers archly, a winning hand flickering up at her — with the house a -10, she had a -2 and a -11. Pure sabacc. Unless Kyp could weasel an Idiot’s Array out of this (which he could  _ not _ ), and barring any truly horrifying randomiser switcheroos, she’d have to start thinking of favours to have done. Ones that were perhaps less  _ banal _ than fetching a fresh cold one, relaxing as only being asked to do that may have been. Kyp had his face kept neutrally in the easy smile that lived there so often. It was difficult to read, as he looked down at his cards, but he did reach down to draw a third card, which boded well, she thought. She set her cards face down as he considered and rested sideways against the back of the sofa, watching him.

“So how’s the girlfriend situation?” She asked, twisting her mouth up into a conspiratorial little smile when he snapped his eyes up at her, train of thought derailed.

“Pardon me?”

“You heard me.”

He squinted at her and looked back down at his cards. “Nice try. But I know what my cards are doing, Solo.”

“I don’t know, you’ve been staring down at them for a while there.”

“I’ve got this.”

She hummed, looking over her shoulder back out the window. It was a nice view, but she knew it was mostly temporary, with the official, final move to the refurbished Jedi Temple imminent. It was a strange thought. They would be the first Jedi in nearly two generations to walk those halls as a real, organised order again — not just a ragtag group of informally trained adherents, but an Order with a High Council and stature in the Alliance, like what had been before.

“Seriously though, how is the girlfriend situation? Still seeing that girl, ah, Lyda, was it?”

Kyp winced over his cards, elbows on his knees and finger tapping the neck of his beer. “That —  _ may _ have been my fault.”

Jaina sighed, “Aw not another one, Kyp.”

“Apparently I’m not emotionally or chronologically available enough.”

“Big news,” she waved her hand as if to gesture to some spectral headline, “War hero not emotionally available. More at eight.”

He grinned down at his cards, “Local man covers latent anger with sarcasm, breaking news.”

“You and me  _ both _ , buddy.”

“Ah, you’re too young to be making jokes like that.”

“I was too young for a lot of things, in hindsight.” She looked out the window again, focusing on the lights, trying not to see the dark spaces. “Should have stayed with the other Jedi kids but no. Had to go be a hero.”

She didn’t mean it to sound as bitter as it did.

“You regret it?”

Kyp was letting his cards fall limp in his hands, seriousness having replaced teasing and game set to one side long enough to ask. She pursed her lips and looked down into the beer bottle she had rested on her thigh.

“No. I don’t regret it. I made a difference - we all did. I think a case could be made that the war was shorter because of what my brothers contributed. If we hadn’t gone to Myrkr, maybe the voxyn would have killed more of us over time. If Jacen hadn’t been…” she tapped her fingers on the glass. “If I hadn’t… left him behind…. maybe we wouldn’t have found Zonama Sekot. He wouldn’t have killed Onimi and found a compromise.” She shook her head. “But regret and realising that we should have done things differently are separate animals. We shouldn’t have been involved. I was too young. All three of us were, my brothers and me.”

“What about what you contributed?”

“Hm?”

“You said what your brothers contributed shortened the war. What about you?”

Jaina ran her teeth across her lip and shrugged. “I followed orders. Not much to be said for that.”

“You figured out how to fool their battle coordinators.”

“By gruesomely harvesting from prisoners of war.” She shook her head, “Not worth holding to the same light as what they did. I tainted my actions and it is what it is, but in any other situation I would be a war criminal, let’s not mince around it here.”

Kyp’s tongue tutted against the back of his teeth, but he didn’t dispute her. He had been there with her. He would be a war criminal several times over just along with her. Her brothers were heroes. Jaina was… she wasn’t sure. She was just fortunate enough to have been on the winning side of the war.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into it,” she tilted her head against her shoulder, resting her cheek there and looking across at him. He set his cards down and sighed, leaning sideways against the sofa back same as her.

“Sticks, you didn’t drag me anywhere. You couldn’t. That’s not how I work.” He held out a hand for her, and she set hers in it without much thought. “You’re worth the trouble, kid.”

Jaina pressed her lips together in a thin smile and shook her head. “I’m not, but thank you.”

“Stop that.”

“What.”

“Saying you’re not worth it.” He squeezed her hand to put a period on the sentence. “You are an extraordinary person, in equal measure to your brothers. You just don’t see it. Anakin… he will always be an untouchable hero. That’s what happens when you die in war, but you and Jacen — you’re worth just as much as he is. And what kind of hero doesn’t call his sister for three years?”

Jaina frowned as she grazed her fingertips across his palm. It was an affectionate, intimate thing that felt strange with Kyp. “Don’t. He went through something unimaginable. If he needs some time to find himself… I want him to. I might call him a jerk, but… I love him, and if it’s what he wants, then how can I do anything but want him to be happy?”

Kyp hummed, but it sounded unconvinced. Jaina pressed her fingertips into his palm and dragged them back to the ends of his fingers and then back. She had last done this to Jag, saying nothing to him while he tried to gently press her for her thoughts. He had tried so hard. He was a good soul, but deserved better than her, and he wouldn’t understand. He’d never been tortured. He hadn’t lived death through someone else’s senses, heard Ulaha sing a death lament for herself, agony and pain. She couldn’t give him what he wanted, not when she wasn’t sure what she wanted, herself. Not sure what she was without a war, and too increasingly angry about peacetime to want a place with him in it. Yelling at him when he got his back up under her suggestion to go back to the Ascendancy had been the strongest she’d felt about a great deal in — oh, probably months. She’d had to insult his pride and drive him off.

“You set your cards down. I’m calling that a finished hand,” she pointed down to his lap where his cards balanced on one knee, and he gestured a ‘go ahead’. She flipped her cards over, smiled smally — -23. “Pure sabacc. Hope you like losing.”

There was no heat to the words at all.

“You’ll have to see.” He didn’t look threatened. Just warm.

She flipped his cards. An ace of coins and a mistress of sabres. Pure sabacc. A +23. It beat her hand. Between a negative and a positive, the positive always won out.

“I win,” he said, softly. She sighed. Mistress of Sabres. The face card had a stylised queen holding a lightsaber to one side — heroic. Sword of the Jedi.  _ Take comfort in the fact that, though you stand tall and alone, others take shelter in the shadow that you cast. _ Tall and alone. Stymied again by some sort of Force prophecy.

“What do you want?” She lifted her hand from his, setting it back in her lap and staring down at the Mistress of Sabers while he deliberated. He was quiet for long moments, and Jaina was struck by how quiet it really was. The thin, constant electrical hum that was always there on Coruscant was the only sound she could hear. He reached out and set his half-empty beer on the caf table, and took hers to set with it.

“Give us a hug, kiddo.”

She furrowed her brow and frowned down at the queen’s face card. The lightsaber was blue. “Pick something else.”

“I’m picking this. You lost. It’s my choice.”

“It’s not right.”

“You don’t know that. Come here.”

Jaina ran her teeth across the inside of her lips and set the card down on top of the pile — Mistress of Sabres looking up at her. Kyp took the deck from her and set it on the table next to the beers. She felt closed in on herself, like all the smiles had drained out and instead she was the same person who had leaned away from Jag, sitting next to him, and stared out the window when he’d been talking to her. Profoundly empty.

“Jaina. Come here.”

She felt like she moved in slow motion, like a potted plant discovering limbs, shifting herself over almost into his lap before being gathered up in a hug that gave her room to escape if she wanted. She didn’t. She pressed her eyes into his shoulder, arms around his neck, and just breathed.

“You’re okay, kid. You have value outside of fighting. You’re more than a soldier.”

“It’s all I know how to do.”

“It’s not. You just don’t remember.”

Jaina frowned, sitting back and looking at him, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to do without a war, Kyp. I was of half a mind when I got here to beg for more anti-piracy missions. I’m only twenty four. I shouldn’t be like this.”

He looked disappointed at her more than anything. “You are who you are, and that is enough.” He rubbed her back just briefly. “You’re a hero, Jaina Solo.”

“I’m the galaxy’s youngest war criminal.”

He sighed and pulled her back for another hug, tighter this time, and he sat there for a while, an anchor, neither reinforcing or disputing. Just existing. It was quiet and she let herself sit there, cheek against his shoulder, and while he always felt like frosted over light in the Force, it was a steady thing upon which to bolster herself.

“He wanted to marry you.”

There was no part of her that panged with the knowledge, no sadness or regret. It was just… empty, where something should be.

“I know.”

“He asked?”

“No. I just… I knew. We’re too young. I’m not…  _ right _ , right now. He wouldn’t have been happy.”

“You still love him?”

“Yes. Yes I do. I think so. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can love anything the way I should.”

He pet her hair gently, soothing. “So dramatic,” he said, but there was no bite to it, no real criticism, and Jaina leaned her forehead into his jaw and closed her eyes. She had been fighting her whole life. She wasn’t sure how not to.

“Hey Kyp?”

“Mm?”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Why?”

She tilted her face up and, brazen and fearless, pressed a kiss to him, just to see. Just to see. It was nice, but some part of her still felt hollow. An echo chamber that seemed to drain of substance when the violence ended. Kyp was sweet, and kissed her like it was something he had thought about wanting, and she could feel that he was interested, but he stopped himself short, like she was held at arm’s length the same way she was holding him. (Kissing Jag the last time had been a torrent of desperation —  _ needyouwantyoupleaselovemeIloveyoudon’tmakemeleavepleaseloveme _ , and  _ that _ knowledge kicked something behind her throat that could taste like tears if she let it. She didn’t. Did she still love him? Yes.) When she rested her cheek back on his shoulder and felt him sigh, it wasn’t surprising.

“I was curious. I’m sorry,” she said, and it was true.

“I’m too old for you.”

“You’re not.”

“When I was your age, you were eight.”

“It’s fine.”

“It really isn’t.”

“You weren’t curious?”

“I was. But not like this.”

“If not like this, then how?”

Kyp seemed to struggle with a good answer before finding it, and she could almost feel the words unsaid being swallowed back.

“Just not like this.”

“Okay.”

“But it was—“

“Nice. It was nice.”

“It was nice.”

She looked across at the Mistress of Sabres, lightsaber in hand, and the remnants of their game, and thought about painting it on her x-wing, like owning herself. Owning herself the same way she owned her pain by painting voxyn on her x-wing after Anakin’s death. Like Kyp had painted an exploding star on his. Mistress of Sabres for the Sword of the Jedi. It would be poetic, in its way.

“We’re both a little off, I think,” she said, and could feel his agreement without having to wait for a real answer.

“Maybe. Misery loves company.”

“Do you want company?”

This time he laughed, but she could feel the surprise behind it. “I thought we were doing the whole doublespeak thing.”

“I’m tired of doublespeak.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Whatever.”

“This won’t go anywhere, Jaina.”

“I know. I don’t think either of us can do.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then I would love company.”

She hummed, staring at the deck of cards still. “I don’t think I want to play any more sabacc,” she muttered, focused on the queen’s blue sabre. Not such a stretch to violet from blue. She’d never be a queen, but she could own her sword.

“Then we’ll do something else.”

She reached over to the sabacc deck when he tilted his head back and sighed, and plucked the Mistress of Sabres from the top of the deck, holding it in her hand and then pressing it over her heart. She was a Sword, and the Force prophecy said she would never know peace, and walk alone, and know so much violence, that that was her purpose — so that’s just what she’d be. 


End file.
